Finland – a Nordic Approach to Spatial Planning
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Finland – A Nordic Approach to Spatial Planning Finland is a young nation state perceiving its membership of the European Union as presenting it with the opportunity of a fresh start. In order to understand why, it is necessary to be aware about Finnish history. In 1809 Russia seized Finland from Sweden, making it an autonomous grand duchy. Thus the Finns were allowed to manage their economy and to look after education, but only on condition that they were no burden on the Imperial treasury. Finnish civil servants even had direct access to the Emperor. In 1917 Finland gained its independence. It adopted a democratic constitution, but one that gave the President a strong position, especially in foreign affairs. The situation in Russia, which had been germane to Finland gaining its independence, was threatening, and the fear of intervention suggested a policy of economic self-sufficiency. Responding to the international situation, the dominant economic ideology became economic nationalism with strong elements of agrarian fundamentalism. (Poropudas 1998:43) The Second World War brought the Finnish dilemma even more sharply into focus, Finland’s economic policy after the war was to a large extent responding to pressure from the former Soviet Union. This influence was channelled via the unofficial national progress programme, written by President Kekkonen in 1956. In the face of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, the chief motive was that of creating a national consensus. (Poropudas 1998:44) The collapse of the Soviet Union had immediate repercussions. Finnish export markets disappeared, sending the economy into a tail spin and pushing unemployment to around 20%. At the same time the end of the Cold War opened the “window of opportunities” (Baldersheim and Ståhlberg 1999:124) for re-establish contacts and markets in the Baltic Countries. In 1995, after a majority of 57% had voted in favour, Finland became a member of the European Union and subsequently the only Nordic country to join the European Monetary Union. Tiilikainen (1996:130) underlines that the Finnish people have quickly adapted to their new European role and that most concerns regarding membership have disappeared form the political debate. In general, and especially as concerns international relations, Finland has been through a learning process, where new concepts and political thinking entered into domestic politics. 102 Finnish characteristics Finland is, with its 5.2 million inhabitants and 338,145 km2, a sparsely populated country, with an average population density of 16 inhabitants per km2. One-quarter of the country is north of the Arctic Circle, about 10 per cent of the total area consists of inland waters, with nearly 190,000 lakes, and about 76 per cent of the land area is covered by forests and woodland. Indeed, Finland is said to be a country of evergreen forests. Forests have been Finland’s most important natural resource for centuries. Pulp, paper and wood product industries represent over one-third of Finland’s exports during the last decades. Only 8 per cent of the land area is used for agriculture. Finland is also a country with thousands of lakes. Lakes and rivers have played an important role in the development of Finnish society. The largest urban centres and industrial settlement have grown up at river mouths, by the side of rapids and hydropower plants or close to waterways. In 1550, permanent settlements did not exist beyond the central Ostrobothnian coast and the southern part of the inland Lake District, and as late as the end of the 16th century, there were only 8 towns in Finland. The oldest town in Finland is Turku, dating from 1309. Urbanisation, as measured by the proportion of population living in urban settlements started considerably late. Finland was a country of forests and farms with less than 10 per cent of the population residing in towns and commercial municipalities until the 1880s, when industrialisation began, which would continue until at least the 1950s. The manufacturing industry, however, never gained a dominant position in Finland’s employment statistics, but there was a direct shift from agriculture’s dominance to that of services. (Poropudas 1998:27) Anyway, the regional distribution of the population has changed dramatically since World War II. In 1940 about half the population still lived in rural areas. The structural change in the Finnish economy and the increase in urbanisation of the 1950s and 1960s were rapid but late by European standard. The urbanisation trend has slowed considerably from the peak years of the 1960s. Today some 81 per cent of Finns are urban dwellers. It is noticeable that all of the 20th century was marked by growing concentration of population in the centres in southern and southwestern Finland, thus moving power of population distribution towards south. (Schulman and Kanninen 2000) The population is currently heavily concentrated in the south and southwest, 25 per cent of the population live in the county Uusimaa surrounding the metropolitan area of Helsinki, where population density is 131 inhabitants per km2. 103 Map 6: Administrative Units in Finland 104 The Helsinki metropolitan area is home to roughly one-sixth of the country’s total population: Helsinki has 555,000 inhabitants, Espoo, 213,000 and Vantaa 178,000. Other important cities are Tampere (pop. 195,000), Turku (pop. 177,000), and in the north Oulu, with 120,000 inhabitants. Anyway, settlement patterns in Finland have a cultural dimension, too. Finland has been, since gaining independence in 1919, a parliamentary republic with two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. The Swedish-speaking minority constitutes about 6 per cent of the population, and lives mainly along the south and west coasts and on the Åland island. The Sami language is spoken by the 6,500 native people (Sami) in northernmost Finland, where it is an official language. Nordic similarities strengthen the view that environmental and climatic conditions have had a decisive influence on the historical formation of the various national characteristics. In Finland, traditional cultural views towards nature are still very much alive. The emergence of national Finnish art and independence contributed very much to creating the national-romantic view of Finnish nature at the end of the 19th century, and vice versa. During the 20th century, the national romantic view has developed towards a “we live off the forest” ideology, based on the major role of the forests and the utilisation of forest resources in the Finnish economy and the influence of this sector on the country’s politics. (Sairinen 2000) The traditional views on Finnishness and its relationship with nature are nowadays in contrast to a more modern orientation on Finnish virtues. The Finns have been very eager to adopt modern lifestyles and technologies and to prioritise material and social welfare. This can make it somewhat difficult to define what Finnish culture stands for today: [It is] an appeal to the past of the Kalevala mythology, of the sauna, ‘sisu’ and Sibelius, or the assertion of Finland as modern, democratic, high-tech welfare state, the ‘Japan of the North’? (Koivisto 1992:58)48 Another dimension of Finnish culture/tradition is a weak distinction between individualism and collectivism, which are not seen as mutually exclusive: 48 Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, is a collection of folk poetry. This poetic song tradition, sung in an unusual, archaic trochaic tetrametre, had been part of the oral tradition among speakers of Balto-Finnic languages for two thousand years. In 1835, when the Kalevala appeared in print for the first time, Finland still had not reached independency. The Kalevala marked an important turning- point for Finnish-language culture because it bolstered the Finns' self-confidence and faith in the possibilities of a Finnish language and culture. 105 The Finns do not ideologically contrast the state with individual responsibility, instead they believe that they complement each other. There is a widespread support for common responsibility. This attitude is probably intensified by the welfare state ideology that has deep roots in Finnish politics. (Sairinen 2000:101) This aspect of Finnishness has to been seen in connection with the discussion on consensus-orientation and corporatism which became a fundamental element in Finnish policy-making after World War II. This forms the backdrop to the analysis of Finnish planning. Ideas of governance and footprints of nation-building Finnish spatial planning and development policy becomes more understandable when viewed in its context of traditions of administration and decision-making. Therefore, this sections will discuss some overall trends in these fields before we turn to recent developments in Finish planning. Special emphasis is given to aspects of central state administration and traditions of policy- and decision-making. Central state administration During the Russian period and throughout the first four decades of national independence, the administrative style of the Finnish state was based on the “ideology of rule of law” (Sairinen 2000:92). Since the 1960s, the ideology of the welfare state began to gain ascendancy as the prevalent administrative ideology in Finland. The role of public administration was gradually redirected from the restriction and control of rights to the distribution of benefits and services. Planning, development, information policy and research became gradually as important as legal regulation. Planning became the main trend of public governing in the 1970s. However, it was for a long time primarily considered as a tool of administration and control; only as late as in the 1980s has planning gradually incorporated interaction between different actors, participation of citizens and impact assessment. Following the economic crises of the welfare state ideology, a new dominating ideology of administration developed in the 1990s: managerialism. Generally speaking, it aims at the implementation of policy targets by optimal efficiency.